There is another
thread going on on this forum revolving around Stephen King's
On Writing, and the best answer to the OP question is to read that and do what it says. At least for your first book, there's nothing in his memoir that will do anything but steer you right. Once you've followed his advice all the way through, at least once, for one complete work, faithfully, then you can decide if you want to experiment with deviations. King would say, finish your first draft, let it sit for a while, then go back through it at least once, before you even give it to your one closest and most trusted critic. Only your third draft should ever see the light of multiple readers. Is that the only path? Maybe not. But it would be sheer hubris for me to say that I, some joker working on his first novel, know better than one of the best-selling and best-regarded novelists of all time. Until we are master pilots ourselves, with at least a thousand hours to our name, we all would do well to be good flight students: fly the pattern the way the instructor pilot says, exactly as he says, to the finest detail, at least once, and see it work and understand why it works, before thinking ourselves wise enough to come up with our own way.
(The brilliance of
On Writing is that he never tells you how to write or what to write. It's not a book about "writing like Stephen King." He just tells you how to produce the truth of your story, your idea, most skillfully.)
Also, distinguish your genuine desire for criticism from your (much more likely, much more prevalent) human appetite for validation. 99.999% of the voice in you suggesting you should "get feedback" is lying. What it really wants is for another human being to tell you that you're doing good, to acknowledge your work and give you moral support. You're alone in unfamiliar territory, outside your comfort zone, and you want dem strokes, as the transactional psychologists would say, to salve your nerves. What you're feeling, no matter how much your own brain tries to tell you that it's a desire for genuine constructive feedback, is probably in reality that latter, lesser impulse, and if that's even possible, then you need to assume it's so and keep going on your own, for the sake of your story. If you really want your work to be yours, if you want your story to be truthful to itself and to you, you have to convince yourself to finish it without someone else reading it and helping you along. Stick with blind validation if you need validation. Here, I'll even give you some right now: I have never seen your work, I have no idea what it's about, but I hereby declare you're doing a good thing by writing it; stick with it. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I validate thee. Carry on.
